Saturday, 28 September 2013

Adam
got into the carriage with the Younger Set. They still looked a bit
queer, but they cheered up wonderfully when they heard about Miss
Runcible's outrageous treatment at the hands of the Customs officers.

"Well," they said. "Well!
how too, too shaming, Agatha darling," they said. "How devastating, how
unpoliceman-like, how goat-like, how sick-making, how too, too awful."
And then they began talking about Archie Schwert's party that night.

"Who's Archie Schwert?" asked Adam.

"Oh, he's someone new since you went away. The most bogus man. Miles discovered him, and since then he's been climbing and climbing and climbing,
my dear, till he hardly knows us. He's rather sweet really, only too
terribly common, poor darling. He lives at the Ritz, and I think that's
rather grand, don't you?"

"Is he giving his party there?"

"My
dear, of course not. In Edward Throbbing's house. He's Miles'
brother, you know, only he's frightfully dim and political, and doesn't
know anybody. He got ill and went to Kenya or somewhere and left his
perfectly sheepish house in Hertford Street, so we've all gone to live
there. You'd better come, too. The caretakers didn't like it a bit at
first, but we gave them drinks and things, and now they're simply
thrilled to the marrow about it and spend all their time cutting out
'bits', my dear, from the papers about our goings on.

"One
awful thing is we haven't got a car. Miles broke it, Edward's I mean,
and we simply can't afford to get it mended, so I think we shall have to
move soon. Everything's getting rather broken up, too, and dirty, if
you know what I mean. Because, you see, there aren't any servants only
the butler and his wife and they are always tight now. So
demoralizing. Mary Mouse has been a perfect angel, and sent us great
hampers of caviare and things.... She's paying for Archie's party
tonight, of course."

Worked
in the morning. Went to tea with Edith Sitwell. Stale buns and no
chairs. Numerous works by Tchelitchew in wire and wax. Harold [Acton]
there. Diana [Guinness, née Mitford] in a hat of the grossest
eccentricity. Edith talked only of poetry. Home to change, then to 500
Club to meet Anthony Bradley who took me to dinner with a beastly woman
called Lady Jean Mackintosh [daughter of the 13th Duke of Hamilton].
From there to a dance by Mrs Gurling. No one I knew. Eventually I
talked to a young man who turned out to be Jim Laurence. He stole a car
and drove me home.from The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Michael Davie (1976)

6 comments:

"Looking back on the literary groupings of the 1930s, Julian Maclaren-Ross identified a style of fiction that he called the 'party novel', its subject matter marked down as 'the day-to-day doings of a "bohemian" group much preoccupied with their love affairs and the impact of their personalities upon each other'. All this makes the Bright Young Person novel sound like a sociological offshoot, and indeed, one of the most irritating things about the genre is its cliqueishness, the vague sense -- discernible almost from one book to the next -- that everybody knows everybody else and the world beyond is simply a joke in rather bad taste... The practical consequence [of multiple personal associations within the group] was a reliance on the private joke, intelligible only to a tiny coterie audience... Sometimes, the joke can involve a single person. The inspired use made of the adjective 'sheepish' in Vile Bodies (as in 'a perfectly sheepish house') stems from the promise made by Waugh to the 12-year-old Jessica Mitford that he would somehow include her pet lamb in the text."

I enjoyed this post enormously. And to share a private, obscure and somewhat unkind joke (about me, unfortunately, and having to do with pictures of simians and Evelyn Waugh), my mother would have really enjoyed it also. (I wish she were around to see and read it.) Julian Maclaren-Ross was really, really sharp in so many ways. I really imagined they would have made a movie about his disordered life by now. I like DJ Taylor's Firbank description: "a wit so delicate that it can scarcely be identified ....the whole invariably undercut with intimations of deep unease, often extending to outright tragedy." I don't know whether you're familiar with Marie Jacqueline Lancaster's book, "Brian Howard, Portrait of A Failure." It's terrific, but obviously very sad. Curtis

Yes, the breathlessness, brink-of-hysteria delirium, loss of equilibrium, sense of apprehension upon the "slipp'ry top", conveyed in Green (much of it in the giddy running-on of the sentences), feels like a reflection of a scene experienced from within, while Waugh's brilliant, brittle sentences seem to skate uneasily across the surface of that scene, avoiding the vertiginous descent to the interior.

Perhaps it's that Green was born into and never particularly wished to escape from those classes to which Waugh always aspired, his nose pressed to the glass from outside as it were, in that complication of love/hate/ resentment/unconscious subscription.

Thank you for posting the link to the review of the Brian Howard biography. Many of his poems do seem like "period pieces," but some of them are (including a couple published in Horizon, as I recall) are memorable and moving. Marie Jacqueline Lancaster, I found out, also has an interesting story, which is recounted in a neat book published a couple of years ago called The West End Front (about London hotel life during WW II) and in the memoirs of the publisher Anthony Blond called Jew Made In England. Curtis